


your light is a seed & the darkness the dirt

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Reference to Drug Use, Visually Impaired Character, reference to prior accident, victor nikiforov makes bad decisions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 02:55:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16109321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: The revelation of Victor Nikiforov’s ennui arrives shortly before one in the morning as he’s taking a piss in the men’s restroom of a high-end Gramercy hotel in the middle of New York fashion week. Looking in the mirror, Victor can no longer find the child he was once, barely sixteen on his first runway.Amidst the white noise of a seemingly-unending malaise, he encounters the work of a visually impaired sculptor, 「KAI」, and finds himself serving as a subject in the reclusive artist's new series.Victor has built an entire life out of being looked at, but in time he may come to discover that the person who understands him most clearly doesn't need to see him at all.





	your light is a seed & the darkness the dirt

The revelation of Victor Nikiforov’s ennui arrives shortly before one in the morning as he’s taking a piss in the men’s restroom of a high-end Gramercy hotel in the middle of New York fashion week. In the two stalls besides the urinals, one person is puking, and Victor is reasonably sure another is snorting coke. It isn’t that he’s judgmental; behind each of these doors are mistakes that Victor’s made before. The fashion industry is the enabler of a great many sins, and a lot of them transpire at exclusive parties exactly like the one he’s at now. 

Looking in the mirror, Victor can no longer find the child he was once, barely sixteen on his first runway. His reflection reveals that his concealer is wearing off, and he feels as stretched as the gauzy chiffon pulled over his face on this evening’s runway, meant to create a stifling, ghastly effect for the waiting audience. He relates more than he’d like to admit.  _ Don’t overdo it,  _ Victor cautions the latter of the two stalls, and he doesn’t have the energy to contemplate or place the answering snarl he receives in his mother tongue. Instead, he rinses off and steels himself for a swift exit, counts down the six air-kisses he’s obligated to exchange on his way to freedom. 

One of these belongs to Christophe Giacometti, who of course refuses to settle for a simple brushing of cheeks. Chris has already invaded Victor’s space, hand settled into the trim taper of his waist.  “Leaving early, beautiful?” Victor’s response is rote and charming; he misses the way Christophe’s hazel eyes linger on his back as the door closes behind him. By all accounts he’s on top of the world. There’s no possible cause for concern. 

Forty-eight hours later, he’s with Christophe again, because they’re both due on the same overnight Virgin Atlantic flight to London, where they’re walking their fourth show of the season together. It’s become routine. Victor built a career out of being surprising, and now nothing is new. 

“I could be asleep right now,” Victor grumbles while they walk through Chelsea. He’s exorcising his bitter feelings with the final clove from a pack he bought on a whim in Duty Free on his way out of Paris, lying to himself about the source of his foul mood. The weather’s been overcast, the kind of sky that can’t make up its mind about what it wants to do.

“I thought you quit,” Christophe observes mildly, and then he stops in front of the Gagosian and waits until Victor’s exhaled his last plume of smoke and stomped the cigarette out on the sidewalk with a bespoke Italian leather shoe.

“I did,” says Victor, without bothering to explain why he’s sinking back into bad habits. Instead he turns a quizzical eye on the gallery, as though to ask  _ why are we here?  _

The answer to the question is the exhibition  _ Three Blind Men Looking at an Elephant,  _ which is a work put on by an artist apparently named「KAI」. “Pretentious much,” Victor remarks, without shame, as though he’s never contemplated a professional career answering only to his diminutive. 

“Shut up,” Christophe retorts, fetching a pair of round, wire-framed glasses from the inside of his coat. Victor is one of the few people who knows they’re for function, not fashion. “Felix suggested it.” Felix Deschamps is Christophe’s live-in-boyfriend, back in Paris, and he works at the Modus, which Victor supposes must mean something when it comes to his recommendations. Christophe likes to think he’s got good taste in art and literature, something Victor remembers relating to once, even if his interest feels distant and anemic now. “It’s a blind sculptor,” adds Chris. “Surely that’s a surprise, isn’t it?”

“Depends on how good the art is,” says Victor, which is exactly when he rounds the corner for the exhibition’s first triptych and has to eat his words. In front of him are three pieces, each positioned at different heights, and collectively they are as good as the first runway he walked, his first shot of vodka, the first time he fumbled in the dark for a human connection he’s yet to actually make and sustain. Up front, and highest, is something that looks like a shattered skull, with thin veins of gold in all of its broken places, the eye-sockets filled with sharp twists of glass. The center of the room is dominated by a large pair of abstracted wings, the flight feathers all made out of shiny, dangerous steel, dipped at the tips in the same molten-looking, liquid gold. Up front is a rough torso in dark bronze, with gilded, interceding hands, done so sharply that Victor thinks of the portraits of Egon Schiele, lean and hungry, replicated here in all three dimensions. It is somehow both more than and less than a body. Traversing the room brings the positioning of all three works into different perspectives; from one angle, they coalesce into a single unit. He stands there now, as though he alone were the subject of the creature’s reach, and reads the name of the series, reflected on a single, simple placard: 「ANGEL」. 

Victor wanders the rest of the exhibit in silence, lingering there long after Christophe has already cleared the gallery. 「LOVE」is the last display, the one Victor spends the least amount of time in. That room features only two pieces, each of them housed in side-by-side transparent acrylic cubes. The first contains a hardened piece of charcoal, gradually crumbling to dust. The second is consistently overflowing from a curtain of water falling as steady as rain from the ceiling, and draining into the floor. 

“Well?” Christophe wants to know, when Victor joins him outside and begins to walk in no particular direction. He feels exposed in a way he hasn’t felt for years. Unfortunately, there’s no outpacing Christophe’s lean, easy strides. 

Victor covers for himself with a wave of his hand and the kind of cynicism that’s appropriate here in New York, where the collections lack the punk sensibilities of London or the dreaminess of Paris. The Americans enjoy a strange dichotomy of cultural agony and stepchild heroics that is utterly foreign to him. “It has to be a gimmick. Fake.” There’s no explanation for it, otherwise. Christophe insists that Felix says the artist is for real, and this time it’s the way he keeps deliberately dodging pronouns that makes Victor bite. “Sounds like Felix doesn’t even know who it is.”

Christophe’s delighted laugh tells him otherwise: “Oh,  _ honey _ . Felix knows them personally.”

London comes and goes. Soon Victor is back in his flat in Paris; the 8th Arrondissement glows just beyond his window. Leaves crinkle under his feet as he walks along the Champs-Élysées, acclimating to shorter days and longer nights, ignoring his own image in the latest Sandro campaign. It’s almost the end of November before he sees Christophe again, this time at a small dinner party hosted at the flat Chris shares with Felix. Victor stays longer than he originally intended, finishing off their nicest grenache straight from the bottle just as Felix comes in from the kitchen, his hair tellingly mussed. Victor can picture it: standing side by side with Christophe, washing dishes. He imagines much too clearly the way one of them must have pushed the other back towards the refrigerator, out of view of the open doorway. Drunk enough to be honest with himself, Victor admits he’s jealous of that kind of easy domesticity: by contrast, his last three kisses have all been scripted for the camera, and with women. Felix sweeps by to collect the empty bottle. “Christophe mentioned you liked「KAI」’s work in New York,” he murmurs absently, peeling off the label. Victor remembers saying nothing of the sort, but doesn’t bother with a correction. It’d be too telling. “Apparently they’re starting a new series on faces.”

“I thought the whole point was that they’re blind,” Victor mutters.

“Severely visually impaired,” corrects Felix gently. That part doesn’t matter: Victor has strolled right into the trap. “They want to do something to convey people in the way that they perceive them, more tangibly. They’re auditioning subjects to work with.”

“More models,” snorts Victor, with a dry smile. He is tired of them; he is tired of himself.

“People from all walks of life, apparently. Including, and I quote,  _ three eight year-old triplets from my hometown. _ ”

Victor would like recover his disinterest, find a safe distance from the topic, or even let it go, but he can’t quite manage. Felix makes it all the way back to the kitchen doorway before Victor asks the question:  _ and where would that be, exactly? _ He gets his answer, some place he’s never heard of halfway around the world, and in the morning, after an uncomfortable night spent on Christophe’s stylish couch, it’s the only thing he remembers clearly. Victor walks home before the apothecaries even begin to open, trying and failing to ignore the bright spark of his hangover; phones his agent. He wants all his shoots booked in Tokyo, from now on. 

“I don’t understand,” complains Feltsman, whose big, rumbly voice is too much to put up with this early in the morning. “You hate the Harajuku aesthetic.”  _ If only,  _ thinks Victor, who promptly hangs up and then pretends his battery’s dead to avoid the rest of Yakov’s calls.

As it turns out, Hasetsu, Japan, is a real pain in the ass to get to, but when he arrives it’s getting dusted by a layer of fresh snow, something Victor used to think was magical until it became an inconvenience for his work, delaying flights and complicating photoshoots. Felix has given him the name of the inn「KAI」 uses as a studio:  _ Yu-Topia _ . It’s a kitschy place consisting of mom, pop, and one daughter in desperate need of a keratin intervention. They’re all adorably protective of their resident artist, including 「KAI」’s fox-faced, young assistant, who serves as the last gatekeeper between Victor and the reason he’s in this backwards, seaside town in the first place. 

「KAI」turns out to be a young man with tousled hair and warm eyes, and his head turns towards the door as it slides open, missing Victor by several inches. Propped up against his chair is a long, white cane. Victor lets the overeager assistant manage introductions and waits for the door to slide shut behind him, considering what he’s supposed to say now. 「KAI」beats him to it. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“... Sorry, what?”

“I got an email from Felix Deschamps.”  _ Felix, of course. _ Everyone in Paris must know where Victor’s flown off to now, Victor muses bitterly, though some small part of him knows better, and understands that Felix and Christophe are his friends, when he allows them to be. 「KAI」continues: “ _ Victor Nikiforov is coming to see if he can be a part of your project,  _ it said. I had no idea what that meant, but I hate looking stupid or hampered, so I googled you. You’re a supermodel. You must know what you look like better than anyone by now.” 

“I like your work,” Victor says with a shrug that he figures「KAI」can’t see. Nonetheless, he drifts to the window and establishes himself in the light there. He is a creature of habit, propped up against the wall, body already angled for consumption. “I saw it in New York during fashion week. You’re doing yourself a disservice. Is that deliberate, or …?”

“What do you mean?”「KAI」inquires with a thin smile, letting go of the cane to run his thumb over the lifeline of one palm. It’s a nervous tic, one Victor recognizes only because all of his have been beaten out of him by the camera’s unforgiving glare. 

It’s a flaw, he realizes distantly; 「KAI」is allowed them, Victor is not.. “If I understood your art at all,” Victor explains, and for some reason he would like to think that he did, that he understood it almost perfectly, “... this isn’t about how things  _ look _ . It’s about how things  _ are _ .”「KAI」’s smile grows the way cherry blossoms do: small and subtle at first, although it will be all Victor thinks of, once he sees it in full bloom. There’s a slight flush high on his cheekbones from the compliment. 

Victor lets himself be charmed by it.

“... You’ll have to be here for a long time. Months, probably. Everyone else who’s helping me is a local.”

“I’m not on a timetable,” Victor replies, which is a lie that he realizes he could turn into the truth. Three months away from his commitments in a place like this, where he’s an unknown, some foreigner who hawks watches and sunglasses, suddenly sounds like -- well, not quite paradise, but something close. Like a chance to remember how to be human again. 

「KAI」swiftly points out the glaring flaw in Victor’s logic. “It could affect your work.”

“I don’t care.” Victor’s startlingly unconcerned about the possibility. Besides Christophe, behind him in the ranks is a furious, green-eyed, snarling brat who needs to get at least four inches more height to glower at anyone with any sort of real effectiveness. Yuri Plisetsky’s editorials aren’t bad, but Victor knows for a fact that platforms get snuck into his shoes for catwalks. There’s also a black-haired, blue-eyed jock who fell into the business already equipped with tattoos, a rock band, and so much bravado that Victor’s made a concentrated effort to forget his name. 

「KAI」hums to himself, contemplative, and then he reaches for his cane and stands. “I will need to touch you,” he says quietly, and almost apologetically. Victor senses this is the final hurdle between the strange reality he currently occupies, and a future where he’s followed this burst of whimsy to its logical end. “Your face. Your neck. Your shoulders, possibly.”

Victor considers this, and then steps closer. He recalls the triptych in the Gagosian; the body of the angel with one arm outstretched for its viewer. An interesting choice, he’d thought, at the time.  _ Do angels even know longing? _ “Who did you use in New York?”

“That was me.”

“Show me,” Victor suggests.「KAI」flinches subtly, like he hadn’t expected acquiescence. Then he tilts his head and shuffles slightly to the left, raising an uncertain hand. Victor reaches up, and carefully guides the artist’s wrist a little higher, until he can cradle the side of Victor’s face. His fingers dust Victor’s cheek. They’re a little bit callused and his nails are blunt and chipped in places. Victor can’t imagine: he got a salon appointment for the day before his flight, and stands here now with a fresh mani-pedi, sculpted and groomed in every possible way because he’s meant to be flawless.  _ The cracks are how the light gets in  _ is a phrase Victor has heard somewhere before; it feels appropriate now. 「KAI」’s hands trace Victor’s jaw, his sharp cheekbones, his bow mouth. They drift, hesitant, careful, up into his hair, and Victor can’t help but smile: he’s always loved having his hair combed through whenever he sits on a stylist’s chair, and it’s one of his biggest vanities. Then「KAI」’s fingers trek back down, over Victor’s high forehead and into the hollows of his eyes. The two of them are only inches apart, and Victor catches himself counting his own breaths as a way to distract himself from how startlingly quiet and intimate the experience is. The moment shatters when「KAI」catches a fingertip on an eyelash and startles, then frowns. “ … Is this mascara,” he asks, like he’s a little unsure. “You’re wearing makeup?”

Victor has an entire skincare regime, a dictatorship of bottles arrayed on his bathroom counter. Concealer hides the way he hasn’t slept; foundation erases freckles. His eyelashes are pale and fine, and he knows the effect his gaze can have on the watching world when he makes the blue of his eyes really pop. It’s all very logical, and meaningless, to boot. “Yes.”

“Go wash it off,” says「KAI」, and when Victor stands there dumbfounded, he leans in, terribly close, and squints. Victor has done some research while stuck in a series of airport lounges. He imagines he’s lined up in some narrow, blurry pocket of light and color, whatever limited field of vision「KAI」has. “Someone with eyes that blue doesn’t need to impress anyone,” he adds, quietly, and Victor nearly launches into his own defense. How he  _ looks _ is part of who he  _ is _ , surely. He gets cut short. “This is about trying to find the real person,” 「KAI」adds, nibbling on his lip. There is a question held between his teeth that he’s afraid to ask, and yet the art demands it. “....  _ You  _ will be more vulnerable without it.” The implication goes unspoken:  _ can you live with yourself, if I unmask you? _

Victor considers. Photographers and designers alike have asked him for all kinds of strange things, but he hasn’t gone completely bare-faced since he was sixteen, standing stripped down and half-naked for polaroids for his agent. “... 「KAI」isn’t your name,” he observes, slow and a little bit stiff. “What do I call you?” 

It’s a two-way street, Victor tells himself.「KAI」makes the real part of himself disappear behind three letters the way Victor hides behind an endless array of personas, and if he’s giving his up, he wants the sculptor to do the same. 

“It’s a play on my initials. My name is Katsuki Yuuri.” Katsuki, like the innkeepers Victor has already met.

「KAI」isn’t just their guest. He’s also their son.

Victor develops a routine out of the absence of one. Sometimes he goes for seaside runs, or hikes up to the temple that overlooks the port. He fields emails, calls in remotely for a few interviews, befriends Yuuri’s parents, his sister, and even a few of the other locals. More than once, he calls home, to no great result: his mother’s a high-functioning alcoholic, and he’s a estranged from a sister who keeps trading on his name and then doing terrible things with it. From time to time, Victor sits for Yuuri’s process, on no specific cadence. He sees the other volunteers, periodically: a set of triplets with chubby cheeks; a sharp-eyed, former ballerina, all poise and grace; an old fisherman Victor passes on the docks whenever he goes for bike rides. In the studio, clay models are beginning to accumulate, all hidden under sheets whenever he comes in to sit for a session. He’s three weeks in, standing barefoot while Yuuri makes measurements and brushes clay-smudged fingers over his cheeks, and he can’t help but wonder if everyone Yuuri works with feels this examined, this laid bare. 

Some feral, unacknowledged part of him hopes that they don’t.

“Can you take your jacket off?” Yuuri asks, politely, and Victor shrugs out of his blazer, leaves it folded over a chair. When Yuuri reaches up to feel for his throat, fingers dipping over Victor’s adam’s apple, Victor wordlessly does something else, too: he unbuttons his collar, and then steadily works his way down the rest of his shirt, giving Yuuri tacit permission to explore. It’s something he’s done for photoshoots dozens of times, which doesn’t explain the sudden clumsiness in his fingers. Yuuri himself is the reason for that: this close, Victor keeps studying the demure curve of his eyelashes, and trying to learn all the nuance of his micro-expressions. Yuuri’s fingers linger in the hollow of Victor’s throat, at the base, and then Yuuri closes his eyes, and traces Victor’s clavicles up and out to the edges of his shoulders, underneath the fabric of his dress shirt. Victor fights off several powerfully strong urges: to gather Yuuri’s hands in his, or to close the distance, tilt his head down and kiss him, but the moment where he might have done so passes quickly. Yuuri turns back to the clay he’s quietly molding from the memory of his fingerprints. Victor ought to be interested in the way his own figure -- as detected by someone who will never be able to see him fully or clearly -- is taking shape. Instead, he finds himself watching Yuuri as he works, making small-talk, letting time pass by slowly, for once, but also too quickly: they’re always done sooner than Victor expects, and he’s more hungry for the warm press of Yuuri’s palms than he has any right to be.

That night, walking back through the onsen over another thin layer of late-December snow, Victor notices the series of large photographs hanging on the walls leading out to the hot springs for the very first time. They’re all good shots, with a strong sense of composition, color, and focus: the steam coming off the water in each of the seasons; a close macro of the figurines standing guard over the garden; one of the olive-green robes, hanging on a hook. Mari’s sweeping up nearby; he inquires just to make conversation. “You have some nice photos of this place,” he notes. “Local photographer?”

Mari hesitates, which is uncharacteristic. “Yuuri took those in high school,” she explains, lips pursed, the sentence carefully crafted.  _ Impossible,  _ thinks Victor, who has only ever conceived of Yuuri as having been born the way he is now. Mari looks at him, expression carefully neutral. “You should ask him about it,” she says, and then she bows her head just ever-so-slightly, which is a polite way to signal that she thinks the conversation’s over. Before Victor goes to bed he can’t help but glance down the long hallway that he knows leads to the place Yuuri sleeps. He wonders:  _ what happened to him?  _

The next day robs him of his chance to ask. Yakov’s arranged a series of photoshoots for Victor while he’s here in Japan, and he nearly forgets about his flight to Tokyo for two different shoots and an interview. In the morning, he steps into a taxi, which shepherds him to a train, and then to the airport, and by late-afternoon, he’s already swallowed up entirely by the hustle and bustle of Ginza. The next day, he’s up at the crack of dawn, ushered to Asakusa and pushed into a makeup chair. He’s shooting Miyake’s latest collection with a half-Japanese, half-Brazilian model he’s supposed to pretend to be in love with.  _ It’s just the two of you,  _ says the producer, standing over the photographer’s shoulder while the shutter clicks. Except it isn’t just the two of them: it’s them and at least ten other staffers, and they’re shooting with a permit at dawn before the streets get busy, because it’s one of many ways his industry can concoct an illusion of intimacy.  Afterwards, she bows and thanks him for his time.  _ You were very committed to the story,  _ says the girl. Victor doesn’t understand quite what she means, and it must show on his face, because she hurries to explain:  _ you always look so longing. _

The half-written text Victor’s been composing to Yuuri while he waits to be dismissed burns in his palm.  _ Finished early, I have lunch free. Suggestions?  _ It doesn’t even make sense that he’s asking. They’ve never talked about whether or not Yuuri’s even been here before, and it’s an incredibly obtuse way to try to make further deductions about Yuuri’s loss of sight. He’s not sure what he expects: for Yuuri not to respond, or for Yuuri to give him the standard list of tourist spots, which Victor’s pretty sure he’s already seen. 

_ Call Happo-en,  _ Yuuri writes back.  _ They might still have space open for tea, and you should be able to hear birds in the garden. It’s very beautiful.  _ So Victor goes, on Yuuri’s recommendation, and the gardens are beautiful, even in the winter. Taking tea there, Victor can’t help but feel that someone is supposed to be sitting across from him, someone with clay under their fingernails, worrying the edge of their cup the way Yuuri does when he’s thinking. In the evening, he takes another taxi to his interview, gliding through the a city lit up with lights for a holiday he knows terribly few of them celebrate.  _ So what are you doing in Japan, Nikiforov-san?  _

He’s letting Katsuki Yuuri dissect him, that’s what, chipping away at the fake pieces that have been accumulating all this time and mining for whatever’s left that’s real. But Victor does not say this. Instead, he gives a vapid answer about a vacation, returns to a luxury hotel with a waterfall bathtub, and sleeps uneasily. By morning, sleet has come in earnest, dampening Victor’s mood all the way to the studio Vogue Japan has set up for this issue’s cover story. There, he’s swept into another chair, and this time waits for what feels like hours as they brush white powder over his face, and add cold sparkle to his eyes and cheekbones.  _ It’s a winter issue,  _ he’s told.  _ You’re the ice prince,  _ they tell him this time.  _ You’re not even human. _

The storm delays his return to Hasetsu, and it’s well past midnight by the time he comes back to Yu-Topia, sliding out of his coat, kicking off his shoes. Victor leaves his suitcase by the door and proceeds directly to bed, forgetting to change. The next day he wakes up to a strange pressure on his chest and an intense headache. It’s all too easy to turn over and hide under the blankets, surrendering to his malaise.

Unfortunately the day has other plans for him: late in the morning, a hesitant set of knocks strike his doorframe. “Victor?” Victor manages a grunt; he’s still alive, even if days like this one make him feel like he’s testing the limits of the word. “I can go away, if you want,” Yuuri mumbles, uncertain.  _ It’s fine,  _ Victor mutters, and as the tatami slides open he momentarily panics about his wrinkled shirt, his hair, his oily face. He hasn’t even brushed his teeth. It isn’t really fine, but what is he, if not a pretender?

“You were late for studio time, so …” The tap-tap-tap of Yuuri’s cane guides him closer, and he sits on the edge of Victor’s bed, because it’s the only place to sit. Victor manages to apologize out of sheer, professional habit. “Nevermind that,” Yuuri murmurs carefully, and Victor watches his fingers as they twist. “I … Well, I was going to surprise you. But if you’re not feeling well, then …”

“Surprise me?” Victor echoes.

“It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” Is it? Oh.  _ Oh.  _ No wonder. Victor’s phone is dead because he forgot to charge it overnight, but he knows perfectly well the kind of incessant buzz that settles into his thoughts at this time of year. He’ll have a thousand social media notifications and his sister still won’t have called. “I thought I’d take you somewhere.”

Victor nearly makes a blind-leading-the-blind joke, because another three hundred and sixty five days have gone by, without his permission, and he wants to punish someone for it. Almost anyone would do, but the universe has conspired to give him Yuuri, this morning, and for reasons Victor can’t even begin to understand, Yuuri is too important to lash out at. 

He bites his tongue and sits up. “I’ll get dressed.”

_ Somewhere _ winds up being Hasetsu Castle, and all Yuuri’s really done is translate for a taxi driver. Victor’s the one who leads him on the tour, though he takes the responsibility of it very seriously. Yuuri’s hand on his arm is a contract between them; it makes Victor responsible for his safety. “... Do you mind if I take a picture of us?” Victor asks gently. 

“As long as you let me see if it’s terrible,” Yuuri jokes with a wry smile. “... I never thought I photographed well.”  _ Yuuri,  _ Victor murmurs, the question on the tip of his tongue, and Yuuri sighs, raking the fingers of his free hand through his hair. “It was a car accident,” he explains. “I got into the School of the Art Institute, in Chicago, and at the end of my first year, some friends and I took a roadtrip to Toronto. The … It wasn’t our fault, the other driver fell asleep at the wheel. But the collision was on my side of the car, so all I remember are the headlights, and then … my roommate felt so terrible about it. He’d been driving. Stayed with me for three weeks in Detroit until I could leave the hospital there.”

Victor shudders; his overactive imagination picks up the image of the oncoming headlights, the honking horn, the twisted metal and the shattered glass. He pictures Yuuri being cut out of a car by an emergency crew and it rattles him someplace deep, makes him reach for Yuuri’s fingers just to reassure himself. “I’m not asking you to relive it.”

“I know. I just wanted to tell you.” Yuuri shakes his head; Victor squeezes his hand. “After all that, I came home and stayed with an uncle in Osaka for a while to do therapy, and to learn … How to navigate, and to study braille, and to get help with my laptop, my phone. It was pretty depressing, honestly.”

Victor’s malaise feels small by comparison, like it ought to be insignificant, and he knows that later he’ll berate himself for being so stupid and selfish a creature. Yuuri, of course, is magnificent. It’s a revelation. Enlightening, even. Victor is not sure of what kinds of dreams he had before being discovered by his modeling agency, but he let them go so slowly he hardly noticed. Yuuri found a different way, somehow, through a darkness Victor shudders to contemplate and is reasonably sure he could not have traversed. Yet Yuuri is with him now, out the other side of it, making art of a different kind. “... what changed?”

“My aunt is an elementary-school art teacher.” Victor has seen Yuuri interacting with the triplets, as he escorts them out of the studio and to their waiting parents. Children are chaos, with no spatial awareness, and yet Yuuri’s brilliant with them in spite of the risks they pose to him. He’s always emerges messier after he sees the Nishigori girls, as though he’s spent half their time together doing nothing but letting them wreak havoc on his working space. It’s one of many, many things that Victor likes about him. “She brought me to visit on the day they had pottery wheels. And that changed … Well, it changed a lot of things.” He smiles, sheepishly. “Sorry. I really don’t mean to be depressing. It’s your birthday. We’re supposed to be having fun.”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had on my birthday in a long time,” Victor admits. He’s spent it in Paris before, when everyone else has the twinkling lights of Christmas to enjoy, but Victor’s never been religious, and anyway, for Russians, the holiday comes later. Because of the emphasis on families, it’s always been depressing to contemplate, the kind of season he’s always tried to pointedly ignore. He realizes he could have gotten Yuuri a gift, instead, and promises himself he’ll think of something to get Yuuri when his birthday rolls around. Victor entertains the idea of a guide dog; when he was younger, the family had a poodle, before his father drifted out of the picture and things got complicated and bent at home. They’re clever, gentle creatures, and one would suit. “... When is  _ your _ birthday?”

“November,” Yuuri admits, with a half-chuckle. 

“Yuuri.” Victor protests this immediately. “Now when am I supposed to get you a gift?”

“... I got you,” Yuuri replies quietly, blush peeking out over his scarf, and Victor stops in his tracks to look at him, to try to decode the thing between them that always makes him want to step closer into the subtle warmth Yuuri exudes, and perhaps never leave it. It’s a curiously possessive way to reference his arrival to Japan, like Yuuri’s stolen him, somehow, and intends to keep him, which is something Victor doesn’t think he would actually mind in the slightest.

It would be nice to belong to just the one person for a change, he thinks. With his whole self. For too long now, Victor’s been giving little slivers of himself away one photograph at a time. 

“Yuuri,” Victor hums, fashioning the syllables into both a warning and an offering. This time Victor’s the one who touches Yuuri’s face, who tilts his chin up. Yuuri leans into the caress of his palm, and leaves what is unmistakably a kiss at the base of Victor’s thumb. Victor tilts his head down, and presses his lips to the outside edge of Yuuri’s subtle smile. Whatever question remains between them is answered when Yuuri turns into him fully, winding his arms around Victor’s shoulders, tangling his fingers into Victor’s hair. It’s the best birthday present Victor could have hoped for, this new thing, which he already knows will be fraught and complicated, but beautiful too. It makes his heart race and feels terribly, dizzyingly real.

“Now we’re even,” Victor jokes, when they break away without coming apart at all, although he doesn’t think it’s entirely true. Yuuri is the one who with every push and every pull has inexplicably put Victor’s soul back in joint, the one who opened the curtains on his life, aired out the windows, let the light back in.

**Author's Note:**

> For [Shall We Read](yoilitmag.tumblr.com)'s first issue, Light. Dyeingdoll made a beautiful comic of one of the most important scenes [here.](https://dyeingdoll.tumblr.com/post/177382345952/we-can-funally-post-our-pieces-for-the-first-issue)
> 
> I'd like to get to the second chapter sometime soon; there are scenes that couldn't fit in the issue that I have sketched out but things have been pretty busy. ♡


End file.
